normalization of the rabbinic movement from politically marginal to main-
stream in Jewish society and Judaism.
This process of normalization is also characteristic of the evolution of the
Christian Easter calendar, as we shall see further in the next chapter. The
formation offixed cycles, and in the fourth century, their gradual standardiza-
tion into 84-year cycles in theWest and 19-year cycles in the East (the former
to be supplanted by the latter in the course of thefifth century) are processes
contemporary with the transformation of Christianity from a dissident sub-
culture to an official imperial religion. As Christianity achieved social integra-
tion and cultural respectability in the Roman Empire, so did its previously
dissident practice of lunar reckoning: it was now formally tied to the Julian
calendar in the form of Easter cycles, and became incorporated, for example,
into the far from subcultural, very‘Roman’calendar of Philocalus in 354CE.By
the time of the Christian Roman Empire, however, calendar dissidence began
tofind new expressions, in the form of religious heresy.
Dissidence and Subversion 353